Leftist presidential candidate gaining traction in Mexico

Updated 11:01 pm, Thursday, May 31, 2012

Supporters greet Mexican presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador at a May 9 campaign rally in Tulancingo, Hidalgo. The former mayor of Mexico City saw his lead evaporate in the 2006 race.

Supporters greet Mexican presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador at a May 9 campaign rally in Tulancingo, Hidalgo. The former mayor of Mexico City saw his lead evaporate in the 2006 race.

Photo: Keith Dannemiller

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Lopez Obrador is within four points of the front-runner, according to a poll published Thursday in the newspaper Reforma.

Lopez Obrador is within four points of the front-runner, according to a poll published Thursday in the newspaper Reforma.

Photo: Eduardo Verdugo

Leftist presidential candidate gaining traction in Mexico

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CHIMALHUACÁN, Mexico - Six years after being denied the presidency by a wafer-thin margin, the barnstorming leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador again is running hard and increasingly well for the office he sees as his destiny.

To 5,000 faithful supporters recently, the man who might have been Mexico's president - and hopes to be yet - declares they've been played for fools by corrupt politicians and their wealthy cronies.

"They have made themselves immensely rich at the cost in suffering of the majority," Lopez Obrador, told the crowd gathered in this haggard urban sprawl on Mexico City's fringe. "They have nothing to do with the people. They are in another world."

Don't get mad, Lopez Obrador now tells followers, get even through your vote. With a month remaining until ballots are marked, that message may be hitting home. An opinion poll published Thursday in Reforma, the Mexico City newspaper that is one of the country's most respected, Lopez Obrador has closed a once-formidable gap to come with within four points of frontrunner Enrique Peña Nieto, the candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

The often dour Lopez Obrador, 59, of the Party of the Democratic Revolution or PRD, tells his followers, "You know when I am the most content? When I am with the humble people, the poor people."

Branded a hard-line "danger for Mexico" in his last attempt, Lopez Obrador this time preaches reconciliation. He's mending bridges with a dubious business community and promising to seed a "loving republic" to cure Mexico's crippling inequality, injustice and gangster violence.

Thursday's poll factors out the nearly 20 percent of voters still undecided.

But it gives Peña Nieto, whose party ruled Mexico for most of the last century, 38 percent support to Lopez Obrador's 34 percent. Josefina Vazquez Mota, of the ruling conservative National Action Party, has 23 percent.

Media bias alleged

The Reforma poll results are vastly different from other recent ones, which give both Lopez Obrador and Vazquez about a quarter of the vote each and Peña with a double-digit advantage over both. Still, other polls also have suggested Peña Nieto's lead is eroding amid corruption scandals involving PRI former state governors and recent student-led protests against what many see as the media's unbalanced support for him.

"The media invents the polls," shrugged teacher Fabiola Diaz, 40, at the Chimalhuacán rally, when the Reforma poll was not yet public. "But we know the difference. This is our year."

Yet the PRI remains a formidable political machine and analysts expect fur to fly as the race tightens. Each of the four presidential elections since 1988 has produced heart-thumping surprises.

Lopez Obrador, who was hugely popular as Mexico City's first mayor of this century and began public life as a PRI operative nearly four decades ago, knows more than a bit about the fickleness of Mexico's politics and public opinion.

At about this stage in the 2006 campaign, various polls showed him 10 points ahead of President Felipe Calderon. But Calderon's campaign aired a damaging ad comparing Lopez Obrador to Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, both of them in video clips warning then-popular Mexican lame duck leader Vicente Fox to shut up.

Lopez Obrador's lead evaporated almost overnight. The Federal Election Commission put his final tally at 250,000 votes behind Calderon, both in the mid-30s percentile.

Differing social vision

Lopez Obrador claimed fraud, declared himself Mexico's legitimate president and had followers close Mexico City's main boulevard for weeks in a futile effort to get the results annulled. Fairly or not, he has yet to live down the public backlash.

"For many people you signify intolerance, deafness and confrontation with those you don't like or who don't share your opinions," leftist poet Javier Sicilia scolded Lopez Obrador on Monday at a public forum where the presidential candidates appeared.

Despite his negatives, which include corruption and misrule by some of his political allies, Lopez Obrador has a reputation for personal austerity. And his left-leaning economic and social vision offers the only alternative to the free-market policies shared by Peña Nieto and Vazquez Mota.

Lopez Obrador hopes the gentler message will play to independents tired of the PRI. The Reforma poll showed him with 42 percent of declared independents, nearly double that of two months ago.

"We think this will turn the tide to Lopez Obrador," said businessman Salvador Nava, 59, who was a staunch PRI member until being bankrupted by the economic crash that followed the party's 1994 presidential win. "The other two parties have had their chance."